Recognized HTML document

CHAPTER VIII

TRANSITION STUDIES: ART OF TRAVEL, GEOGRAPHY, CLIMATE
A. ART OF TRAVEL


"The highest minds in the highest races seem to have been those who had the longest boyhood." FRANCIS GALTON, Hereditary Talent and Character, Aug. 1865.

"I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever-much cleverer than the discoverers-never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs. This implies sharp observation and requires as much knowledge as possible of the subject investigated. But why I write all this now I hardly know, except out of the fulness of my heart."

CHARLES DARWIN, Letter to his son Horace, Dec.-15, 1871.

WE left Francis Galton at the end of our first volume aged 32, married, with many social friends, an ample competence, and a mind trained both in observation and analysis. His experience had been such that he knew more of mathematics and physics than nine biologists out of ten, more of biology than nineteen mathematicians out of twenty, and more of pathology and physiology than forty-nine out of fifty of the biologists and mathematicians of his day. Added to these advantages he had gained a knowledge of man and his habits in various lands; this gave him additional width of view, if it rendered less obvious to him that field of investigation wherein his powers were ultimately to achieve their most noteworthy successes. Indeed, had Galton been asked in 1854 what was his calling and the nature of his studies, there is little doubt that he would have replied: "I am a traveller by inclination and my study is geography." In his Memories' Galton tells us that he was

"rather unsettled during a few years, wishing to undertake a fresh bit of geographical exploration, or even to establish myself in some colony; but I mistrusted my powers, for the health that had been much tried had not wholly recovered."

Whether marriage or health was the real source of Galton's `Wanderlust' being reduced to vacation rambles, it would be hard to say, but we have probably to thank one or the other for his continued presence in England at a time when startling new ideas were to strike upon his receptive mind. Immediately, however, travel, geography, and closely associated therewith, climate, were to occupy his attention; and he did not touch these things without leaving his mark upon them.

"It was not long after my marriage," he writes, "that the character of a piece of work that lay before me was clearly perceived. It was ready to be taken in hand and most suitable to my

1 pp. 161-2.

PGII   1